Happy September! Let’s get into the Cartoonist Cooperative’s roundup of what’s new and exciting for comics.
News
Pink Midnight Presents: Barber Psychic is now crowdfunding! Read the solicit below.
Clarence Adams is a small-town barber with a horrible secret: when he cuts your hair, he sees your future. But Clarence tells no one, and does all he can to keep the future intact. He works. He gets married. He lives a life. He lives the life he knows is laid out for him.
Pink Midnight Presents: Barber Psychic follows eighty years in one man’s life, as Clarence tries to do what’s right by doing nothing, even as an increasingly uncertain future threatens to swallow him whole.
DEATH IN THE MOUTH: Original Horror from the Margins is the second installment in the horror anthology series showcasing BIPOC and other ethnically marginalized writers and artists from around the world. It will feature 20 stand-alone prose stories spanning from the mythic past to the far future, cross between real and fictive worlds, and explore unique and unsettling manifestations of horror. Each story will also be accompanied by an original black and white illustration by a unique artist. Crowdfunding now!
Kill My Boyfriend is a comedic 5-issue mini-series that reinvents the beloved whodunit genre with a unique twist and an eclectic cast of characters. In this story, revenge takes center stage and murder becomes an art form! Crowdfunding now!
The print edition of J Dalton’s Phobos and Deimos is crowdfunding now! Read the solicit below.
Maida Kilwa is a teenage refugee from Mars, who is faced with the difficult process of adapting to her new life on Earth. From high school life to a dystopian government, Maida is torn between the promise of safety and the fires of rebellion.
8 years in the making, Phobos and Deimos is a thoughtful reflection on migration and class. It’s about finding a new place to belong in an unfamiliar world, while navigating a hostile school system. How will Maida find her way?
New at the Co-op Journal: Aquifers of Color: a review of A Terrified Child Played by Jeremy Strong
Reviewed by C. S. García Martínez
In A Terrified Child Played by Jeremy Strong, cartoonist Ezra David Mattes casts actor Jeremy Strong to play Mattes’s own childhood self. Currently, only one of eight parts of the self-billed “anti-memoir” has been completed, serving as a slice of what promises to be a rich, unnerving work that cuts to the very core of the idea of fiction and the depiction of memory. This completed section stands alone, depicting only one of these experiences: Mattes and Strong visit a grocery store where there used to be a lobster tank that unnerved the childhood Mattes. The pair walk through the brick back wall of the store and into Mattes’s home, where Jeremy re-enacts the experience of running for help the night the stitches in Mattes’s father’s intestines rupture.
Events
- Emerald City Comic Con is open for applications until October 30th.
- C2E2 is open for applications until January 3rd.
- Zine Fest Houston is open for applications until September 10th.
- TCAF is open for applications until October 20th.
Featured Opportunity
To receive additional opportunities and resources every month, we invite you to become a member of the Co-op!
- Lammy Award Submissions open on September 18th. Lambda Literary Awards celebrate the outstanding LGBTQ+ storytelling from a given year.
Member Accolades
Congrats to the winner of The Dream Foundry 2023 Contest Monu Bose Prize for Art: ReYtzin!
Congrats to Reimena Yee for being shortlisted for the Comic Arts Awards for Australia!
We also had several members of the Co-op nominated for the Ignatz Award!
- Olivia Stephens, Darlin’ and Her Other Names, Outstanding Artist
- Shades of Fear (featuring members Desolina Fletcher, Mar Julia, and Olivia Stephens), Outstanding Anthology
- Archie Bongiovanni, Mimosa, Outstanding Graphic Novel
- Remeina Yee, The God of Arepo, Outstanding Online Comic
- Blue Delliquanti, Adversary, Outstanding Online Comic
- Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith, Wash Day Diaries (chapter: “Ride or Die”), Outstanding Story
Congrats to all the nominees! Winners are announced during Small Press Expo this weekend.
